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I disagree that it felt like a Raimi Spidey movie but it was about as safe and formulaic as you could get. They nearly took a risk but then decided to edit out all the risky stuff (much to the detriment of the overall product).

I skipped The Amazing Spider-Man. It seemed so pointless. As a lifelong Spidey fan, I'm tired of his origin. Oddly enough, I will happily go see the sequel to The Amazing Spider-Man probably having never seen the first film.

__________________
"I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. I’m a machine and I could know much more."
- Cavil, Battlestar Galactica

I like them both. There are ways in which Raimi's version was closer to the comics, and there are other ways in which Webb's version is closer to the comics (e.g. mechanical webshooters, Gwen and George Stacy). Raimi's version, like any adaptation, was a variation on the theme, a new interpretation building on some facets of the comics and doing without others. Webb's is simply a different variation on the theme, doing the exact same thing but selecting different facets to emphasize. It's no more cynical than what Raimi did. If anything, it's good we have two different adaptations that emphasize different facets of the comics, because they complement each other, make up for each other's deficiencies.

TASM was weird because, due to having the same producers, it felt... uh... just like a Raimi Spider-Man movie?

Seriously? Wow, I found them radically different in tone and approach. Raimi's were more broad and larger-than-life and, well, Raimi-esque, while Webb's film is more serious and down-to-Earth. And the casting couldn't have been more different. Obviously the makers of ASM were deliberately trying to differentiate it from the previous series as much as possible, so that it wouldn't seem pointless, and I think they succeeded.

We even got a scene of the villain talking to himself, ala the butchered Doc Ock in SM2.

Consider the source material. The Lizard in the comics has been a split personality since long, long before SM2 was made. In fact, the trope fits the Lizard much better than it fits Doc Ock, because in the comics Ock was never portrayed as being controlled by his arms the way he was in the movie.

And Spidey seemed to lose his mask every other scene too.

Which can be said of most live-action superhero movies ever made, and was a trope of the genre long before Tobey Maguire put on the red-and-blue suit. Actors like to have their faces on camera. Filmmakers like to have their stars' faces on camera. It's what much of the audience is paying to see, for one thing. For another, it's hard to convey emotion through a mask. In animation, the animators can cheat and have the mask's eyeholes and such distort to convey emotion, but that can't happen in live action. So most live-action superhero movies have the characters lose their masks at key dramatic moments. Heck, it's not even limited to superhero movies. Look at all the military movies where fighter pilots take off their oxygen masks to deliver dialogue, or cop movies where officers in body armor take off their helmets at key dramatic moments even when they're still in the line of fire. This is one of the universal tropes of cinema, so it's completely unfair to claim that it's an imitation of Raimi's Spidey films in particular. It's just a hard thing to avoid in any live-action film featuring a character in face-concealing headgear.